The Harlem Shake signals a new era and a new type of “mass” production

Traditional “modern” economics, culture, media and identity have been shaped and expressed within a framework of industrialisal standardised mass production and consumption – we see this everywhere from fashion, dance, music, politics, food and education – it has become pervasive – it has become culture.

However, the Internet changes everything. With so many people so well connected anyone who is connected can be heard globally and contribute – ideas travel quicker and faster than ever before. In “Apocalypse: The Network Event Horizon” I describe how the Internet has let “the Genie is out of the bottle and “Too Big To Know” , Ruining Everything and helping a “generation to find its voice. We are approaching a point of no return – a network Event horizon – a Web Squared Technium where scale, scope and the self-reinforcing social and technology power laws of a technology mediated connectivist memetic (Cemetic) culture generate a cambrian explosion of diversity, uncertainty and non-linear emergent viral exponential change.”

Gangnum style represented a cross over point – it was a traditionally produced official product which people connected, copied – it was heavily choreographed and eminnetly reproduceable . Cross over was represented by its viral spread through the Internet and the way it was remixed in throusands of parodies and different contexts.

Harlem Shake is the cross over – there is no official video, instead there is a simple framework for people to make there own video. In the Harlem Shake we have a signal of a new type of “mass” production and consumption. Instead of a standard item being manufactured and consumed on scale we have differentiated and unique items being manufactured and consumed on scope. Harlem shake represents a shift from the old economies of scale to a new economy of scope.

Networks are central to meaning, culture and evolution. They define the community and the circulation of meaning within a community – from a connectivist perspective they define knowledge and meaning, from a memetic perspective they are the means through which memes are transmitted and from a cemetic perspective networks are culture – they are community, meaning and evolution.

However we look at it networks are vital to culture and never before have people been so connected as with the Internet. In terms of numbers 2.3 billion people were online at the end of 2011(33% of all humanity) and by 2020 it is expected that 5 billion people will be connected – 66% of all humanity. While the scale of internet connectivity is important it is the nature of this connectivity that is even more important – web 2, social media and social networks mean that anyone who is connected can be heard globally and contribute their ideas. In the next decade 3 billion new minds will become connected and most of these will be from developing countries – introducing new voices into our global networks.

The number and diversity of connections and inputs into the network is important. From a memetic view this increases the variety and mutation of memes available for selection and inheritance. When considering the problems of genetic inbreeding then memetic diversity and a large meme pool can only be healthy for humanity. From a connectivist view the number and diversity of connections and inputs into the network increases the richness of meaning, the strength of weak ties and opportunities for tipping points.

Ray Kurzweil focuses specifically on technological exponential rates of change and argues that the Accelerating Returns of exponential growth will eventually create a tipping point to what he calls The Singularity – a time when the change graph over time is vertical change and we reach an era of unpredictability, apparent chaos and uncertainty that only our machines will understand. Kurzweil makes a compelling case – “It took the printing press 400 years to reach a large audience, it took the telephone 50 years, the mobile phone seven years, and social networks only three. The pace of innovation will only continue to accelerate, he says, because exponential evolution is built into the very nature of technology”

While we are still a long way from Kurzweil’s singularity the Genie is out of the bottle and “Too Big To Know” , Ruining Everything and helping a “generation to find its voice”. We are approaching a point of no return – a network Event horizon – a Web Squared Technium where scale, scope and the self-reinforcing social and technology power laws of a technology mediated connectivist memetic (Cemetic) culture generate a cambrian explosion of diversity, uncertainty and non-linear emergent viral exponential change.

1) everything that’s already in the world when you’re born is just normal

2) anything that gets invented between then and before you turn thirty is incredibly exciting and creative and with any luck you can make a career out of it

3) anything that gets invented after you’re thirty is against the natural order of things and the beginning of the end of civilisation as we know it until it’s been around for about ten years when it gradually turns out to be alright really.

Culture can be considered as the circulation of meanings within a community. A culture can be considered through the nature of its community (members and connections), through the way meanings circulate and through the nature of its meanings (as manifest in ideas and behaviours). Community, connection and meaning are so interconnected that they have to be considered holistically – each defined through the others and each shaped through the others.

Memetics is a powerful theory with which to explore how meaning develops and evolves. In Memetics there is a “unit” of culture called the Meme – an idea, behavior or style that spreads from person to person within a culture. A meme acts as a unit for carrying cultural ideas, symbols or practices. In Memetics memes are analogous to genes in biology – memetics considers how memes develop and evolve through natural selection in a manner analogous to that of biological evolution through variation, mutation, competition and inheritance.

Connectivism considers meaning as emergent from the connections and associations in a network – it could be considered as the application of neuro-psychology associative memory and learning ideas to culture. For connectivism learning and the development of meaning are “the process of creating connections and developing a network”.

For me, Memetics alone doesn’t go quite far enough in considering the holistic connected nature of culture and meaning – the way meaning, culture and the network (the medium) are one.

Connectivism sees the holistic nature of culture, meaning and the network but connectivism alone doesn’t go far enough in considering how they evolve.

A connectivist perspective on memetics would view the meme as a network connection configuration – something emergent from the connectivity pattern in a network and something I would describe as a ceme (connectivist meme).

A Memetic perspective on connectivism would view the network through evolutionary terms – seeing variations and mutations competing for selection and inheritance – something I would describe as Cemetics.

What I am proposing is a concept that combines the memetic view with the connectivist view to get a holistic perspective on culture, connection and meaning – the ceme.

Ceme: connected emergent meaning evolution (Connectivist Meme) – a unit of culture which has evolved through the natural selection of emergent variations and mutations in network connectivity configurations.

Cemetics:
Cemetics considers how cemes develop and evolve through the natural selection and inheritance of emergent variations and mutations in network connectivity configurations.

Networks are central to meaning, culture and evolution. They define the community and the circulation of meaning within a community; from a connectivist perspective they define knowledge and meaning, from a memetic perspective they are the means through which memes are transmitted and from a cemetic perspective networks are culture – they are community, meaning and evolution.

“The Web does not just connect machines, it connects people” (Tim Berners-Lee). Social media is pretty much what Tim Berners-Lee envisaged for the web when he started his early development work. The original web 1.0 was an analogue of traditional publishing media which provided the opportunity for people to read on-line – this was familiar, easily understood and accommodated. Web 2.0 provides the opportunity for people to write as well as to read on-line – this is less familiar and has not been so well understood or accommodated. Social media takes Web 2.0 even further by predicating itself on people’s contributions, interaction and participation – the consequences are even less well understood or accommodated than Web 2.0.

Simply in terms of numbers social media is is important. Radio took 38 years to reach 50 million users; Terrestrial TV took 13 years to reach 50 million users; the internet took four years to reach 50 million people. Facebook added 100 million users in less than 9 months! Facebook has been growing at over 100% year on year; in February 2010 it had a “population” of 400 million active users (25% of all web users) – if it were a nation it would be the third largest on earth. 67% of Internet users use social networking, its ahead of email use and accounts for 10% of all time spent on-line. Wikipedia has more than 13 million articles in more than 260 different languages and would be 1043 volumes if printed. Youtube serves 1 billion views a day.

Social media is shaping the way we communicate and access information. Social media provide new public and private places to meet and interact – the importance of which are now being recognised by all areas of society from politics, business, work, media, communities to education.

In Media: Social media has become an important media “channel”. Youtube, for example, is becoming an integral part of mainstream media on-demand delivery – hosting content from 60 partners, including Channel 4 and the BBC. Live performances are being streamed via social media U2 on Youtube and the Foo Fighters on Facebook. Social media is helping to evolve the way media is produced and consumed. The Youtube orchestra and the work of media remix-mashup artists show how social media are evolving media. TV and radio shows often either have an official twitter presence such as BBC Question time and Radio 4 today or have unofficial presence that adds a new dimension such as for the Eurovision song contest or an unexpected consequence as in the case of 2009 Xfactor. Access to social media is important for access to media and the world of media.

In Identity. One of the major factors in identity is that of social interaction and we shouldn’t be surprised to find that social media is playing a major part defining on-line identity and will do so even more in the future. Original forms of identity might be described as Identity 1.0 – website and institutionally centric – typically we need to enter unique identification into each system we want to interact with. A currently developing form of identity could be referred to as Identity 2.0 – user centric – where we can enter a common identification into the various systems we interact with. The promising current development with identity 2.0 this is with OpenID for identification OAuth for authorisation and their combination. Many major systems have become OpenID+OAuth providers (e.g. Google, Yahoo, Microsoft) and many allow its use to provide access. Social media (Facebook, Myspace, Twitter) also offer Identity 2.0 – both in terms of identity construction through social interaction but also for access to third part resources.Twitter, for example, is an OpenID+OAuth provider and this is my preferred method of accessing websites. Facebook can act as an OpenID rely and have also developed their own widely used social identity system called Facebook Connect while Google has been developing Opensocial as methods of providing access to and adding social features to third party websites. Access to social media is important for access to identity and to interact and access a great many resources.

In Education: Learning is about interaction with information, people and activities as is social media. Youtube, for example, gives access to an unprecedented wealth of learning material accessible from the Youtube Edu channel are videos from world class universities and experts such as MIT, UCLA, Stanford, Harvard, the Open University and UNSW, as well as a wealth of socially generated material on all manner of subjects from relativity through to how to change a tap washer and how to change a car tyre. Wikipedia is of course a well used socially created source of information but also has its socially created content at Wikiversity.There are also some very interesting learning activities and resources available such as the 140 university on twitter. While many Educational institutes use social media such as Twitter and Facebook to engage students before, during and after courses. Access to social media is important for access to education and the world of education.

Music has become one of the important indicators of cultural shift – In the last week I’ve come across several events which, whilst interesting separately, coincidentally suggests a fundamental shift is underway in media.

Much music activity is still of the traditional create and consume push model albeit mediated in various ways these days. The Foo fighters stream was particularly interesting as it presented an “intimate” and interactive studio based setting to millions of people who could interact via facebook and twitter with each other and to a limited extend with the band as well.

The next step as I see it is a more dynamic “mash” of media – performing out to a live audience and the Net with increasing opportunities to pull in from the audience and the Net.

I’m imagining how artists could use Augmented reality to overlay new dimensions to their performances – While performing in the studio The Foos could overlay a concert venue or other action scenes – indeed they could augment a performance anywhere. I’m imagining how artists could augment other performers and performances in their shows for example when doing a cover track.

With audience smart camera phones I’m imagining how you could view a performance from various points of view.

I’m wondering whether, like in original Shakespeare plays, members of the audience could say “I can do that part better”, get up on the “stage” and play the part. Consider Youtube performances and their video responses for example Steve Vai Tender Surrender and some of the amazing responses.

We are only a few weeks into the year and it already seems clear that one of the major trends will be integration activity to “orchestrate” information sources – to create lenses to MASH and focus information for our Personal Information Environments.

Activity Stream integration

Social networks were a big factor in 2008 and social networkers were among the first off the blocks in 2009 to catch my attention with a meeting on January 9th at the offices of Six Apart to discuss standards for activity streams. People belong to different social networks but cannot easily (if at all) communicate between these networks – solving this problem will be like the day when email users on different email systems could email each other.

News Stream Integration

Another early set of activities that caught my attention were the discussions about RSS overload and the need to deal with this somehow. RSS is an essential tool for pulling information into your environment but with the dramatic growth of the web even RSS has trouble coping. Michael Kowalchik describes how our feed readers and our use of them are based on the older email paradigm of inboxes and a must read all items attitude. Kowalchik says that both feed readers and our attitudes to information need to change – ” people will increasingly want to experience information, not be slaves to it”. Kowalchik describes Mike Winner’s the “River of News Concept” which informed many news aggregators including Grazr – “the name “grazr” comes from, grazing information, not drowning in it.”

Activity and News Stream MASHING

Another item that caught my attention was the way the way on-line social media responded to the Hudson River Plane Crash. There have been many stories of the way news breaks first on social networks and about how the major news corporations make use of material from people camera phones but what caught my attention this time was the way in which social media itself could offer coverage. Kevin Sablan’s Almighty Link used storytlr to gather feeds from Twitter, Flickr, YouTube and Vimeo to create an aggregated “real-time “story”. He describes “the hard part was editing, or what Tim Windsor calls curating, the approximately 700 bits of information into some semblance of a disjointed story”. The result was “a stream of moments captured by individual storytellers, the “lifestream” not of a person, but an event.” There was also a Hudsonplane Friendfeed room which could be regarded as a “web2.0 viralism mashup” equivalent of a newsroom of the event.

Beyond Google – The Real Time Web

Writing for RWW Bernard Lunn uses the web 2.0 response to the Hudson Plane Crash to illustrate the way in which the web has moved from IBM (mainframe) to Microsoft (client-server) to Google (on-line) and is now moving beyond Google’s grasp and into real time. He argues that “It’s the Real-Time Web that will unseat Google. This idea has been percolating for a while, but it took a plane landing in the Hudson River to make it obvious. Google cannot be real-time. It indexes the historical web, and it does it better and faster than anyone else.”

PIE and MASH a Lens For a Semantic Web

With all the activity and news streams flooding into my on-line environment I feel my river of news is more like a rapid – I want something to pre-process the streams and present me a river instead of a torrent. I want to be able to search and define sources; aggregate them and sort their presentation according to my own criteria. For example, I would like to input items on Cloud Computing from Twitter; Youtube; blogs and traditional news sources and web sites. The part that I think will develop this year is the difficult next step of pre-processing the information sources. Quantitative pre-processing tools exist – tools like Postrank will exam social bookmarking statistics, blog hits, referrals and comment quantities to rank feeds but what I would like is some form of qualitative pre-processing – this is the difficult part – for what do I mean by Qualitative. At the moment my qualitative assessment of information is associated with people and recommendations. To find news I check Twitter first and see what my network is talking about, then I check the RWW and Mashable etc for RSS feeds. In terms of Quality I would need a way to weight feeds according to mentions of sources and people – not just numbers of hits.

In order to apply qualitative criteria to information sources either the information sources must carry additional information (meta data like tags,statistics, Microformats and RDFa) or a tool must be able to extract data from the context of the information source – how it is associated in the web – how richly it is associated and with what. I seem to be talking about the semantic web and this is not surprising as semantics (meaning) is largely about associations and relationships between things – the more meaningful something is the more deeply and richly it is associated with other things and meanings.

People are getting used to Personal Information Environments (PIE) – systems like iGoogle or Netvibes where you can suck in various information and display it in various ways.However, PIE tools look set for a revolution in 2009 if

Marc Canter’s DiSo Dashboard proposal gains traction. By implementing DiSo dashboard proposals popular PIEs could extend and integrate across social networks and Lifestream activity as well as RSS mega aggregation.

I’m hoping that tools will become smarter in 2009 and help me manage my information sources more meaningfully – I will be keeping an eye on the DiSo project in general and the DiSo Dashboard idea in particular,

Many comment that in our on-line activities will leave little past, however it is certainly true that our recent past is better documented that ever before. You can access my twitter activity from this time last year here is my first tweet for example and you can see all my past blogs including my Predictions for 2008 to see how good, bad or ugly they were.

William Gibson’s quote “The Future is Already Here – It’s Just Not Evenly Distributed” is a powerful and practical idea for working out what is going to happen in the short term – extrapolate the current edge and current trends. Things usually get smaller, lighter, easier, cheaper and more functional and common place – computers and telephones are good examples of this. We must also beware of technological determinism – we have to consider the complex interaction of contextual factors (economy, culture etc) that can change the “trajectory” of any extrapolation.

Using my crystal ball to throw the light of the recent past into the near future – it all seems quite cloudy to me and everything I see is on-line. The big theme for the year will be on-line everything and as more go on line network effects will cause more to go on-line resulting in an explosive growth in on-line activity. Despite of (or maybe even due to) economic problems 2009 could be a significant year for the information age – when many 20th century physical industrial activities are moved on-line.

Let’s try to focus some of this.

Media

The industrial processes of the 20th century to represent, distribute and consume information will continue to disappear – information is intangible anyway and so is ideal for on-line virtualisation.

Audio: Audio set the example of how information can move away from the physical the stories of Napster and iTunes are now history and the Nokia music service of 12 months unlimited free perpetual but protected downloads takes this model almost as far as it can go. With music content “infinitely” copy-able and accessible monetization has to move to an incidental model of distribution deals and sponsorship. The SeeqPod service indicates that on-line streaming/access could be a significant development. It will always be useful to have off-line copies of your favourite music but the advantages of streaming are there for everyone. For consumers there can be an “infinite” range to listen to on-demand without management – just search. For the industry on-line listens can be instrumented (pun intended) and monetised with “incidental” and direct marketing. There is of course better control – music can be published free at source (e.g. from Sony), with the publisher monetising through “incidental” services but also allowing 3rd party API and streaming access for downstream services. I like the concept of on-line downstream “radio stations” such as Blip.fm, Lastfm and Pandora. Indeed Pandora offers an excellent example of the benefits of the on-line model in driving further interest by what could be described as audio surfing.

Video:Youtube and the iPlayer provides good examples of what we might expect in video. iPlayer has many advantages (on-demand view) especially with the BBC “transmitting” live on the net via iPlayer. Youtube in particular has become such a mainstream distribution method – standard TV channels, organisations, political parties and of course individuals are all there (e.g. BBC, Channel 4, Obama, Google and have a look at the Governator).

Words: Newspapers and magazines all have good on-line presence and for many their on-line activity is increasingly necessary and important. Pew research finds that the Internet has overtaken newspaper as a source of news for many people and for young people the Net is the main source of news. All the newspapers now offer excellent RSS feeds and various incidental services such as reader and journalist blogs, podcasts and various systems interfaces for systems such as Facebook and Twitter for example. The New York Times indicates how “newspapers” may develop – with the news of their API development program to “make the NYT programmable. To start 2009 the NYT release Represent – it mashes geographical information with various web data to present information about the politicians who represent geographical areas in New York. Books I feel will also succumb eventually – the physicality of a book (cover, typeface etc) are much like the physicality of old vinyl records. During 2008 e-book readers became a lot better and the advantages for industry and consumers over paper became tangible. Although the e-book reader really is useable now it is another purchase and item to carry around and look after – I would prefer to access an books on my smartphone or laptop/netbook. I think that e-books will break the market in for consolidation onto standard equipment – a prediction for 2010 I recon.

MASH Media

I can’t resist it but in 2009 “the medium is the message” (sorry). Possibly the biggest development in media will be the way it all gets mixed up – once they all share the same medium then they can mix and match. 2008 has seen the start of this and it is becoming increasingly common – 2009 will see a lot more of this. Already in 2008 we see newspapers with plenty of additional media content – the Guardian tech weekly for example has audio, video, blogs, Facebook, Twitter etc and text – the Bivings Report indicates just how active Newspapers are on the web – e.g. all have RSS feeds, 75% accept comments on articles and most now have free access. Cross platform media outlet Current indicate how media may develop – in their US Election coverage they have been combining video coverage with input from Twitter, Digg and 12seconds.TV.